Week 13 (at least) of the State mandated lockdown in South Africa.
I barely remember what things were like before. Life resembles a movie…several spring to mind: ‘1984’, ‘Contagion’.
I’m more worried about what other people might be going through than I am personally, people losing jobs and livelihoods, people hungry, people who’s suffering doesn’t serve a narrative favourable to the politically powerful or politically correct – or both, suffering out of the public consciousness.
There is the promise in Scripture that nothing, however distasteful or painful, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8%3A35+-+39&version=NIV

Having to attend the local traffic department, wait 4 hours in a queue, be processed like meat was my lowest point this week. And yet, Romans 8 reveals that this experience did not separate me from God’s love.

Four and a half hours interacting with a government department, I left feeling like a part of my soul was sucked dry
I was walking this week, thinking about that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus tells the audience to look at how the Father provides for birds, comparing this to the greater care he has for people.
Birds seem to be making a better fist of it than people. Birds don’t put other birds in prison, or cancel them for holding different opinions, or make them stand in queues and tax them, or judge them by their different feathers.

I was struggling to understand what it is about people that is worth saving. Suffice it to say that the Father views human beings with an incomprehensible grace. And having set his love on us, that love trumps any situation that we can’t understand and that causes us the most profound pain.

I don’t feel it, but I know it to be true. There is beauty in the humble back yard, there is His grace every morning. There is family and faith. And a conquering church that keeps on going.